grace from john 4

Merciful God, you have moved and changed our lives in amazing ways, yet we have kept these stories to ourselves. We confess the times we have kept these stories to ourselves out of fear of rejection a...

Living God, our souls thirst for living water. Open our hearts and minds to your Word this day, so that, like the Samaritan woman, we may have a grace-filled encounter with you, the Living Water.

Jesus did not wait for people to come to him. He went out and delivered the grace of God. As we go out of this place today, may we deliver the grace of God wherever we go as well. Amen.

O God who will not let us go, we confess that we have been so wrapped up in ourselves that have not loved You with our whole hearts, and we have not loved our neighbors as we love ourselves. By Your g...

God’s grace is present in all people and cultures. As we submit ourselves to learning from other cultures, we catch glimpses of God’s grace that would be unavailable in our own culture.

In the Second World War, a group of soldiers were fighting in the rural countryside of France. During an intense battle, one of the American soldiers was killed. His comrades did not want to leave his...

[For Christians] the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up, and forgotten. The church is not in the religion business. It never has been and it never will be, in spite of all the ecclesiast...

When a musical instrument’s strings go loose, it sounds awful. But you can also overtighten the strings, breaking them or creating discord. There’s a perfect tension to grace and truth, which makes th...

We cannot will ourselves to accept grace. There are no magic words, preset formulas, or esoteric rites of passage. Only Jesus Christ sets us free from indecision. The Scriptures offer no other basis f...

Our Lord Jesus is ever giving, and does not for a solitary instant withdraw His hand. As long as there is a vessel of grace not yet full to the brim, the oil shall not be stayed…. He is a rock in the ...

My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.

[God’s grace is] always hidden under the strangest appearances.

I am not what I might be, I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I wish to be, I am not what I hope to be. But I thank God I am not what I once was, and I can say with the great apostle, "By ...

Lord, I crawled across the barrenness to you with my empty cup. . . . If only I had known you better, I’d have come running with a bucket.

It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me . . . The more we love, and the more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God — who, after all, loves ornery cr...

Birds need two wings to fly. With only one wing, they’re grounded. The gospel flies with the wings of grace and truth. Not one, but both.

The story is told of a little girl who prayed, “Lord, make the bad people good and the good people nice.”

My job is not to solve people’s problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace ...

I have come to know a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who recruits people like the adulterer David, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. I have come ...